June 4, 2023
The future of sports: Jacob Rothman of Perch on the new emerging technologies that are disrupting the world of sports
Jacob Rothman of Perch On New Emerging Technologies
June 25, 2021
New Orleans, Lousiana – June 25, 2021 – The New Orleans Saints are not necessarily trying to make bionic men, but they are feeling around on technology’s leading edge to help their players uncover their peak form in the weight room. So, roll with Saints longtime strength and conditioning coach Dan Dalrymple as he puts on his best cinematic voice.
“We have,” he said with a dramatic pause, “the technology.”
The Saints are one of the latest NFL teams to incorporate Perch technology in their weight room. The basics: A 3D camera affixed to a weight rack tracks an athlete’s movement as he or she performs a specific exercise. That movement is then translated into several data points in real time and displayed on a tablet. The goal is to provide smarter and more efficient weight training that eliminates some of strength training’s traditional limitations.
The two most important metrics Perch provides are velocity and power output. Think of how most standard weight lifting routines are laid out: Sets of a specific number of repetitions at a specific weight, a figure that is determined as a percentage of the maximum amount a person can lift in a particular exercise.
“The reality is that maximum was on one specific day when maybe everything was going right, or maybe everything wasn’t going right,” Dalrymple said. “But it’s just one snapshot, it’s not a video.”
Put another way: If you spend the week before you attempt your one-rep max following a stringent wellness routine, your number is going to look a lot different than it would have if you’d have spent the prior week bingeing fast food, alcohol and Netflix. And by the same logic, variations in lifestyle are going to cause regular fluctuations in what, say, 80% of a max effort is on a given day.
Which leads to what Perch co-founder Jacob Rothman called “super imprecise” training.
“The research says that number can fluctuate close to 20% on a daily basis,” Rothman said. “So that means that if you’re really not well rested at all and you set a goal of 85% of your max, for that athlete it may feel like 105% on a given day. And you certainly don’t want your high level athletes, these high-value assets, lifting that amount of weight. They shouldn’t be.
“Additionally on the NFL side, these guys never max. Coaches never measure what their actual one-rep max is, because you’re never lifting that amount of weight on the field. And it’s also risky to do that with these players. So really all the programming becomes guess work.
The way around it is to not base the routine on the percentage of the max at all.
Dalrymple runs an Olympic-style strength program and he has typically tracked his athletes by load (the amount of weight they push) and volume (sets and repetitions), but he has long been fascinated by velocity-based training — or training that is guided by how fast an athlete can push a weight, rather than a percentage of their one-rep max.
First identify a target speed. If the athlete’s lift is too slow, take weight off. If it’s too fast, add some weight. This is not a new concept.
“The velocity-based training goes back to the Russians,” Dalrymple said. “Everything in my field seems to go back to the Russians in the ’80s. This is one thing where maybe the ‘Rocky’ movies with Ivan Drago were a little accurate.”
But the technology was often clunky, finicky, frail or all of the above.
Essentially, there was a gap in the strength training world. Tech is everywhere in the fitness and athletics industries now. Saints kicker Wil Lutz can go back after a game and see what his heart rate looked like before a big kick. Teams can use GPS trackers to crunch numbers from practice and games, or media companies can use them to show how fast Alvin Kamara ran on a spectacular touchdown. But the weight room was still, for the most part, in the dark ages.
Enter Rothman and a handful of circumstances. There was his location, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); there were the technological trends and the aforementioned gap in strength training; and there was an injury Rothman suffered while lifting weights.
“When you step into the weight room, it’s super low tech,” Rothman said. “There’s so much information that is being missed. ... It’s data that is really valuable. It’s basically making a weight rack smart — that’s how we like to describe it.”
They came up with Perch, which they hope will help nudge strength training into a more modern (and safer) direction.
Rothman first got to know Dalrymple about two and a half years ago at an NFL Combine trade show. Since, the Saints have taken the long run when it came to embracing the tech, putting it through a handful of trial runs at their facility first. But this offseason they fully integrated it into the plans for the players who chose to train at the Saints’ Airline Drive facility.
Dalrymple said the early returns have been very encouraging for the Saints staff. The players have taken to the user-friendly interface, they’ve found new ways to compete (‘I lifted 400 pounds!’ ‘Well, I lifted 400 pounds faster!’) and, most importantly, their training is fine tuned.
The thing he’s most excited to see are the applications in the middle of the season.
“When we get in season, (playing in a game is like being in) a car wreck,” Dalrymple said. “You have a week to get better from that car wreck, and then you do another car wreck. So as the season wears on, with it being a 100% injury rate, everybody is dealing with something at some point. “Is that maximum that you did in the offseason really still appropriate for the player? Now, on a daily basis without having to do much, we can see not only how much weight is on the bar or how many reps the player did, but how quickly and efficiently the bar moved. And we can look at that and there’s formulas we can use that tell us, ‘Is that an appropriate load?’”
And, even if it’s just a small drop in the bucket of all the things that make a football organization successful, it is a drop nonetheless. They have the technology, so why not use it?